Paradox
by Dark Sorceress Hecate
Summary: A paradox is an infinite and instant contradiction. Sanada Ryo is a paradox, because technically, he doesn't exist. Possible crossover.


Hi, all. This one is sort of an experiment. It probably won't be updated very frequently, but it wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it.

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On that fateful morning, everyone was up and about, even Touma. Everyone except Ryo.

This was odd. Usually, Ryo was awake far earlier than most of the other occupants of the house. For him to be asleep at this time of the morning was unheard of.

Finally, at noon, Nasuti knocked on his door. "Ryo? Ryo, it's lunchtime. Time to get up." Receiving no answer, she tried again. "Ryo? Ryo, can you hear me?" She opened the door, expecting anything and everything from a soundly sleeping boy to a bloodily dismembered body. What she found, however, was highly unexpected.

The room was empty. Everything that Ryo owned had disappeared. There was no sign that anyone had ever been there.

§§§

They called the police, of course. When the better part of a week was spent on psychic searching with absolutely no effect, they called in mortal authorities. It was then that several interesting things were revealed.

Ryo had obviously been preparing to leave for a long time. He paid back any money that he might have owed anyone, returned borrowed objects to their owners, and removed almost all pictures of himself. All this happened quite naturally over the span of several weeks, so naturally that most of his tampering was obvious only in retrospect.

But the really interesting things were uncovered when the police looked up Ryo's birth certificate, and discovered that it didn't exist. There was no immigration record, no birth certificate in any foreign country. There were a few people named Sanada Ryo scattered around, but they were all too young or too old, and none of them looked anything like the few pictures of him that remained.

In spite of this, the drive to find him was continued, fueled perhaps by the intense media attention that followed these extremely odd discoveries. However, in spite of the best efforts of the Troopers, the police, the media, and the general public, no clues were ever found.

As the years passed, the former troopers drifted apart. Ryo's loss was felt too keenly when they were together, so they separated, still reuniting occasionally for old times' sake.

Seiji vanished when he was twenty-three, on the second anniversary of Ryo's disappearance. His remaining friends tried to find him, but all his family had to say on the matter was that he was fine, and that he'd needed to leave. They said that he might come back someday, but that it was up to him.

They grew older, slowly, slower than ordinary humans, but eventually old age claimed them as it did everyone else. Several decades later, they began to die, one by one, first Nasuti, then Shu, then Shin, and finally Touma.

Few noticed the small, teenaged, black-haired, blue-eyed boy who attended the funerals, staying in the shadows and crying silently. Those that did never gave him a second thought, never thought to connect him to the old, unsolved missing-person case.

After all, the men had lived to be well over a hundred years old. Sure, the boy might possibly have looked like the still-missing Sanada Ryo, but he was a child, seventeen at most. If Sanada was even still alive, he would be ancient.

None ever got close enough to properly see him. If they had, they might have changed their minds, seen underneath the underneath. The strange, silent, misplaced boy might have looked young, but his eyes were nearly bottomless, and older than anything seen in the mortal world.

§§§

_Why?_

_Why am I still here? Still alive? It's been millennia. I guess going into the past to live as Hariel was predestined after all. Was it truly a paradox?_

_I wonder when I got thrown into this loop. Was it when I defeated Arago as Ryo or as Hariel? Maybe it was both. I guess I'll never know._

Ryo sighed, looking up at the moon. He noted distractedly that it was much harder to see now, through all of the light and pollution, than it had been even fifty years ago. It was the end of the 20th century. 'Sanada Ryo', the boy that he once was, would be living in Japan.

_I could go back, just to see them again..._

He shook his head. He was thinking nonsense. There was already too much of a chance of screwing up as it was, he didn't need to make it easier to destroy the space-time continuum. He had not lived four thousand years on this planet, wandering nomadically to stop people from discovering his secret, to have everything fall apart now. His friends would be about ten years old now; he just had to stay away for the next century or so.

_I want to see them so much_...

Ryo sighed again, and turned away, vanishing into the relative darkness of a summery San Francisco night.

_Seiji...guys...I miss you..._

§§§

_It hurt...Oh, gods, it hurt._

_Fire, inside him, around him, all over, scalding, scarring, destroying, healing, recreating._

_It was pure, so pure, and it hurt so much._

_He couldn't see, couldn't think, couldn't hear his own agonized screams. Nothing existed outside of the fire._

_He was...dying, reborn, not yet born, all stages of life, all at once._

_It was beautiful, terrible, wonderful, absolutely terrifying._

**_Your destiny is not here, Ryo no Recca of the many names. You were born under different stars, and you will endure. There is a world beyond this. You must defend it._**

_He passed out, knowing that he was real again, and that his friends were there to catch him._

_He would examine the strange difference that he felt inside himself later, when he could think again._

§§§

Shin sighed as he got off of the train. He looked around, noting that it had changed in the past five years. It was time for their semi-annual reunion again. At first, they'd gotten together every year, but as time went by, old friends began to slip down the priority list, much as they didn't like to admit it.

It also didn't help that two of their number had long since disappeared. It had been over thirty years since Seiji's disappearance, and Ryo had vanished off the face of the Earth even earlier. When Seiji had left, it had destroyed what remained of their old camaraderie. Three Troopers were not the same as five, and it hurt too much to think about the missing pieces where their friends used to be.

And then...Fate.

He saw, out of the corner of his eye, a boy with familiar messy black hair. He turned fully, seeing that no, it was not another hallucination brought on by wishful thinking, and that whoever-it-was was walking away down the platform.

"Wait!" he shouted, chasing the strange-familiar boy. A small part of him knew that this was madness, chasing a facsimile of someone who had disappeared decades ago, and so could not be the real person, but that part of him was tiny, and easily ignored.

When he finally did catch up to the boy, he saw with disappointment that it was not—his mind finally dared to whisper—Ryo, but he could not be blamed for his mistake. The boy was an almost perfect double of the boy who had disappeared so long ago, but there were differences. Ryo's skin had not been so pale, nor had his hair been quite that long. Instead of the brilliant blue that he remembered so well, this boy looked quizzically up at him with silvery-green eyes.

"Sir, are you okay?" His voice was polite, confused, and slightly wary. This nutcase of an old man had just chased him across a train station and was staring at him like he was a ghost.

Shin smiled self-deprecatingly. "I'm sorry, you just reminded me of someone. A friend who died a long time ago."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. Just my memory playing tricks. Now go on with you, I bet there's someone waiting for you."

The boy smiled sadly, and melted away into the crowd. Shin collected his bags and went on his way.

It wasn't until much later, lying on his old bed in the house that held so many memories, that he realized that the boy had been a dead ringer for Ryo in more ways than one, that he had never asked a lot of questions that he had meant to, and that he could no longer clearly recall him.

When he woke up the next morning, he would not remember the encounter at all.

§§§

Outside, a young boy let out a silent sigh of relief. He blinked, letting silver-green return to blue, and allowing pigment to return to his skin. It had been foolish to come here, and he wouldn't have unless it had been crucial to his current job. It was a very good thing that this new duty came with several strange powers that he had learned to use very well a long time ago. He had needed to change his appearance at the last minute, and do a little mental finagling to stop the awkward, dangerous, and all-too-perceptive questions surfacing in his old friend's mind.

As he had so often before, he looked up at the night sky and wondered why this felt like betrayal.


End file.
